Aug 19 Award nominations for budding author Victoria Leslie

Award nominations, a book launch and starting a PhD mean 2016 has been an exciting year for Portsmouth alumna, Victoria Hope Leslie.

Her collection of 14 short supernatural and ghost stories, ‘Skein and Bone’, is nominated for both the 2016 World Fantasy Award and the 2016 British Fantasy Award. One of the stories, ‘The Blue Room’ is nominated for the British Fantasy Award best short fiction. To add to that, her first novel ‘Bodies of Water’ was launched earlier this year.

Victoria made her short story debut in Britain’s premier horror fiction magazine, Black Static, in 2011. She has since had four more stories published there, and one in its older Science Fiction and Fantasy sibling, Interzone. In 2013 she won the Lightship International First Chapter Prize and was a finalist for the 2014 USA based Shirley Jackson Award, in the novelette category, for her story ‘The Quiet Room’. As well as her fiction works, she has also written academic pieces on gender issues.

Victoria grew up in Milton, and now lives in Southsea. She graduated from the University in 2006 with a BA in English Literature.

Studying at the University of Portsmouth gave me access to literature that challenged and inspired me, delivered by passionate and enthusiastic lecturers.

— Victoria Hope Leslie

Although Portsmouth is very much ‘home’, Victoria has also travelled widely including China and Malaysia and volunteered in an American homeless shelter. As a college student she spent a week at the United Nations during the annual International Labour Organization convention, which was as a result of winning a national essay competition. Last year, she spent two months in Finland as part of the renowned Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence for artists and researchers. “This was a great opportunity for me,” she said. “Not only did I get a chance to research Nordic folklore – with stories ranging from cautionary tales about the Finnish Maid of the Forest to Sami traditions associated with water and the underworld – but it also gave me the space to finish work on Bodies of Water.”